Law Commons^™

May Class Counsel Also Represent Lead Plaintiffs?, Bruce A. Green, Andrew Kent

Faculty Scholarship

For decades, courts and commentators have been aware that the potential for conflicting interests among the class representatives, class counsel, and absent class members is inherent in the class action device. Notwithstanding this realization and a substantial amount of scholarly and judicial commentary on class conflicts, one kind of conflict has not received due attention: the conflict that inevitably arises when class counsel also represents class members as individuals. We demonstrate that this conflict— so common to be almost invisible—arises from the very beginning of a putative class representation, and may create a fraught situation for a lawyer concurrently representing …